Sold to the Alpha King, Pregnant by a Stranger Chapter 13

Sold to the Alpha King, Pregnant by a Stranger Chapter 13 – The Silent Queen

Twenty–six weeks.

I spent fifteen of them in a bed in the east wing of a palace I’d never seen from the outside, hooked to monitors,

screamed at by healers every time I tried to walk to the window.

The silver had left scars where scars don’t show. Some days my hands shook. Some days the bond went thin and staticky and I’d wake up clawing at my throat.

And every single one of those days, Rune Draven ran a kingdom from a chair beside my bed.

He signed treaties on my nightstand. He took the Council by video call with one hand in my hair. He held a bucket for me at 4 a.m. and then went to a war summit at seven. When the Council formally objected to a Luna of “unverified lineage,” he walked into that chamber and told twelve of the most dangerous wolves alive that the next man to say the

word unverified would be leaving the room in a bag.

They confirmed me unanimously.

“You didn’t have to threaten them,” I said afterward.

“I really did,” he said. “It was very satisfying.”

The trial of Theodore Marrick lasted four days. He was found guilty of high treason, attempted murder of a royal heir – two counts and poisoning the Alpha King. The Council recommended execution.

I asked for exile instead.

Every wolf in that chamber turned to stare at me. I was twenty–one, six months pregnant, and speaking in public for

the first time in my life.

“He wanted a monster on the throne,” I said. “Don’t give him one.”

They still talk about it. Sable says that’s the day the territories fell in love with me. I mostly remember that my feet

hurt.

At thirty–one weeks, I woke up at 2 a.m. with my heart pounding and my wolf on her feet inside me.

Now, she said.

I got out of bed. My legs held. I walked to the balcony under a full moon, and for the first time since I was thirteen years old and stood in a moonlit field crying while every other kid in my class shifted around me, I reached for her.

And she was there.

It didn’t hurt the way they said it would. It felt like taking off a coat I’d been wearing for twenty years.

Rune found me in the courtyard twenty minutes later.

A white wolf. Enormous – bigger than any of the guards, bigger than the Alpha of Silvercreek, moon–colored and

silver–eyed and standing in his rose garden with her head up.

He stopped dead in the doorway.

Then he went down on one knee in the grass, and he was laughing, and he had a hand over his mouth, and there were

tears running down the face of the most feared wolf on the continent.

“There you are,” he said. “There you are, my Silent Queen.”

The palace guard came running and then stopped, all of them, and one by one they knelt in the wet grass.

And a thousand miles north, in a rented apartment in a border town, my mother saw the footage on the morning news: a white royal wolf in the palace courtyard, and a king kneeling in front of her.

Sable tells me she called forty–one times that day.

I didn’t pick up once.